If I put the 4X in my Ultra 5 will I be able to boot from it?
Do the machines have enough horespower to play a DVD?
I also have a 64MB PCI Radeon. Anyone tried to use one in a sparc machine? I know I won't be able to see OBP, but if I set the kernel to load automatically I should be able to see it when the Radeon framebiffer driver loads right?_________________Gentoo systems.
X2 4200+@2.6 - Athy
X2 3600+ - Myth
UltraSparc5 440 - sparcy

If I put the 4X in my Ultra 5 will I be able to boot from it?
Do the machines have enough horespower to play a DVD?
I also have a 64MB PCI Radeon. Anyone tried to use one in a sparc machine? I know I won't be able to see OBP, but if I set the kernel to load automatically I should be able to see it when the Radeon framebiffer driver loads right?

Actually SPARCs have no BIOS, but OBP will be able to use the drive just fine.

As for the Radeon, it may work. As some of the newer SPARCs have Radeon chips as their default video chipset. Hopefully it'll work in your case as I don't know if anyone has tried this before.

I did this in my G3 for awhile with my voodoo3 before I found the mac bios to flash into it. I had yaboot setup to boot Linux automatically. You couldn't see any video until the linux kernel booted and loaded the driver. I never had any issues doing that, so I'm hoping it'll be the same on the sparc. I'll have to add the stuff in by hand to get the kernel to even compile it. I'll give it a go this week since I'll be opening the machine for the DVD burner install anyway._________________Gentoo systems.
X2 4200+@2.6 - Athy
X2 3600+ - Myth
UltraSparc5 440 - sparcy

I found my ultra5 was a little touchy about what drive it would work with.. I had to try a few I had lying around before it would work. Then again this problem might be addressed in a later version of OBP. I've never upgraded what's currently on the machine.

By the way.. Is there any way to flash upgrade OBP withough installing solaris? Can it be done via TFTP?

I found my ultra5 was a little touchy about what drive it would work with.. I had to try a few I had lying around before it would work. Then again this problem might be addressed in a later version of OBP. I've never upgraded what's currently on the machine.

By the way.. Is there any way to flash upgrade OBP withough installing solaris? Can it be done via TFTP?

Now the next question. Anyone tried to install a SATA card, and put a second HDD above the floppy?

I'm thinking I can put /boot on the IDE, and use the rest for general Storage, and then put / and swap on a fast SATA drive with the SATA drivers compiled into the kernel.

I have a SATA/USB/Firewire card, but I have no idea what chipsets are on it. If I get that, my PCI radeon, and an rt2500 based wireless card working it would be really cool._________________Gentoo systems.
X2 4200+@2.6 - Athy
X2 3600+ - Myth
UltraSparc5 440 - sparcy

Well I do have a PCI Netowork card running in my U10.. so the wifi card should be no problem it was so easy infact I have forgotten how I did it lol

The Radion should work, I see no reason why not

I am interested to see what milage you get from the SATA card, the IDE on U5/U10 is so slow its just plain silly..
<still looking for a Sun SCSI card for mine> Grrrr

Yeh, faster drives don't seem to help much, so I wondered about changing it. I'd like to use a nice mouse, so PCI-USB is going in either way. SATA and firewire would be very nice for faster storage

I've tried my Adaptec 2940UW in mine, and had no problems with it. It's not bootable, but you can still use it for / if you have /boot on the internal IDE with the SCSI drivers compiled in your kernel. Alot of the Symbios Logic cards are sun bootable, because they have hardcoded PCIIDs in OBP. You might want to give a search on eBay then google the card/controller chip to see if it was ever offered in a sun box._________________Gentoo systems.
X2 4200+@2.6 - Athy
X2 3600+ - Myth
UltraSparc5 440 - sparcy

Now the next question. Anyone tried to install a SATA card, and put a second HDD above the floppy?

I'm thinking I can put /boot on the IDE, and use the rest for general Storage, and then put / and swap on a fast SATA drive with the SATA drivers compiled into the kernel.

I have a SATA/USB/Firewire card, but I have no idea what chipsets are on it. If I get that, my PCI radeon, and an rt2500 based wireless card working it would be really cool.

In my ultra5 I currently have:

Usb 1.1 card with an opti chipset (The via based usb2.0 I tried card was detected by the kernel and whatnot, but none of the ports worked)
Promise ATA100 IDE card with a drive hosts / and swap. /boot is on a drive connected to the onboard IDE since the promise card is not bootable
an RTL 8139 based network card

The performance increase was notable when moving to the promise card. Here's some quick and dirty benchmarks from the two drives currently in the system.
hdd is the drive attatched to the onboard controller hde is the promise hosted drive. Both are 40 gig maxtor drives I got about 2 years ago

I don't see why an SATA card would not work as long as it's supported by the kernel. I've heard off hand that silicon image based controller cards are a bit more forgiving on non-x86 systems but I havent verified that myself.

Well that's good and bad news. I "think" the card I have has 3 via chipsets, but I'm unsure until I pull it out of the old non-working P-90 tomorrow.

I have to make a choice here
3 PCI slots

If I get the wireless NIC working it's definately staying.
If I get the Radeon working it's staying.

I'd like USB and SCSI or SATA. Either way I'll have to buy a new HDD for it
Maybe just get a non-via based usb 2.0 card, and use my external USB hdd enclosure. Anybody ever used a USB for /?

Hard chioces.
Maybe I should just ditch the Ultra5 for a 10 or 30, so I'll have some more PCI slots to play with._________________Gentoo systems.
X2 4200+@2.6 - Athy
X2 3600+ - Myth
UltraSparc5 440 - sparcy

If you get usb working you could always go with a USB wireless adapter ;D
I've got a USB2.0 external encloser and it screams on a 2.0 host. It also works reasonably on the ultra5, as fast as to be expected with 1.1
I don't know what it takes to make a USB root parition. Would you have to start with a custom initrd?

I tried a PCI radeon, but didnt have much luck. I've got a hunch the card is fried anyway so I wouldent discount it just yet.

The ultra10 would be a bit eaiser to play with. One of the ultra5's pci slots is on the 'back' of the PCI riser card. The slot is right over the motherboard's power cable and IDE/floppy ports and makes it very cramped for anything but the smallest PCI card. Fortunally I've got a cheap NIC that's about the size of a stick of gum.

If you get usb working you could always go with a USB wireless adapter ;D
I've got a USB2.0 external encloser and it screams on a 2.0 host. It also works reasonably on the ultra5, as fast as to be expected with 1.1
I don't know what it takes to make a USB root parition. Would you have to start with a custom initrd?

I tried a PCI radeon, but didnt have much luck. I've got a hunch the card is fried anyway so I wouldent discount it just yet.

The ultra10 would be a bit eaiser to play with. One of the ultra5's pci slots is on the 'back' of the PCI riser card. The slot is right over the motherboard's power cable and IDE/floppy ports and makes it very cramped for anything but the smallest PCI card. Fortunally I've got a cheap NIC that's about the size of a stick of gum.

I've had nothing but trouble from usb wireless adapters. Hard to find one with a decent chipset, and the TX power on them is usually weak along with a crappy antenna. I think my wireless NIC will just fit over in the cramped #2 slot though, do no trouble there._________________Gentoo systems.
X2 4200+@2.6 - Athy
X2 3600+ - Myth
UltraSparc5 440 - sparcy

I couldn't get the rt2500 ebuild to work in any fashion, so I decided to download the drivers from the ralink website. You have to modify the Configure script as executable per their instructions, and run it. Basically it looks like it only configures your kernel source and module install dirs, and to make sure you have wireless support compiled into your kernel. I had to turn on wireless support in the kernel before running configure since it only checks .config. Running make stops quick with an error, but I noticed in the error it was trying to compile for -march=i686!! I just deleted -march it at this point instead of setting it to v9/ultrasparc. It stops again griping about -mpreferred-stack-boundary=2. I'm unsure what a proper setting(if there is one) would be for an ultrasparc, so I deleted it aswell. The module compiles cleanly after this, so I make install, and modprobe rt2500. It loads, and dmesg shows the card!! Ifconfig -a shows ra0 now. I still have to re-compile my kernel and try to install wireless-tools. I'll also have to try and get a good version of baselayout that works with the wireless extensions, and all it's deps. It should all be downhill from here._________________Gentoo systems.
X2 4200+@2.6 - Athy
X2 3600+ - Myth
UltraSparc5 440 - sparcy